Adam Dickinson

English Language & Literature

Associate ProfessorPhD Alberta

Areas of Specialization:

Adam Dickinson is a poet and a professor of poetry. His creative and academic writing has primarily focused on intersections between poetry and science as a way of exploring new ecocritical perspectives and alternative modes of poetic composition. His book, The Polymers, which is an imaginary science project that combines the discourses, theories, and experimental methods of the science of plastic materials with the language and culture of plastic behaviour, was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He has published two previous books, Kingdom, Phylum (also nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry) and Cartography and Walking (nominated for an Alberta Book Award). His scholarly work (supported by SSHRC) brings together research in innovative poetics, ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and pataphysics. His current research-creation project (also supported by SSHRC) involves him testing his blood and body for chemicals and microbes in order to produce a book of poetry that reframes the body as a being overwritten by toxic chemicals yet constantly subject (in necessary ways) to the biosemiotic interference of other microbial lifeforms. He has been featured at prominent international literary festivals, such as Poetry International in Rotterdam, The Harbourfront International Festival of Authors in Toronto, and the Oslo International Poetry Festival in Norway. Adam welcomes potential student supervisions on topics in poetry and poetics, environmental writing, science and literature, and creative writing.

Selected recent publications:

Books:

The Polymers. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2013. Finalist for the 2013 Governor General’s Award for Poetry and finalist for the 2014 Trillium Book Award for Poetry.

“Imaginary Solutions for Water: Pataphysics and Biosemiotics in Erin Mouré and Lisa Robertson.” Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context. Eds. Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013. 439-473.

“Better Living through Pataphysics: The Biosemiotics of Kenneth Goldsmith.” Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North American Avant-Gardism, 1963-2008. Ed. J. Mark Smith. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013. 132-151.

In journals such as: Arc Poetry Magazine, BafterC, Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012, and 2014, boulderpavement: arts and ideas, Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, dANDelion, Event, Lemon Hound, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, PRISM International, Rampike, TRUCK, and The Walrus.